With the advent and the ever-increasing popularity of the World Wide Web, more and more previously unrelated technologies are becoming integrated with the enormous network of information and functionality that the Internet provides. Everything from television and radio to telephony and video conferencing are now available online, amongst a wide variety of other technologies. One such area of technology that has seen a recent explosion in growth, is telecommunications and related services.
Conventionally, telecommunications and network infrastructure providers have relied on often decades-old switching technology for providing routing for network traffic. Businesses and consumers, however, are driving industry transformation by demanding new converged voice, data and video services. The ability to meet these demands often can be limited by existing IT and network infrastructures that are closed, proprietary and too rigid to support these next generation services. As a result, telecommunications companies have been transitioning from traditional, circuit-switched Public Switched Telephone Networks (PSTN), the common wired telephone system used around the world to connect any one telephone to another telephone, to Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) networks. VoIP technologies enable voice communication over “vanilla” IP networks, such as the public Internet. Additionally, a steady decline in voice revenues has resulted in heightened competitive pressures as carriers vie to grow data/service revenues and reduce churn through the delivery of these more sophisticated data services. Increased federal regulation, security and privacy issues, as well as newly emerging standards can further compound these pressures.
Delivering more sophisticated data services has proved to be more difficult than first imagined. Existing information technology (IT) and network infrastructures, closed proprietary network-based switching fabrics and the like have proved to be complex and rigid in allowing the creation and deployment of new service offerings.
In recent times, specialized telecommunication application servers have emerged to enable simpler ways for developers to include telephony-based functionality in their software applications, as well as to provide increased security and stability. Nevertheless, these specialized solutions continue to need improvements in performance generally required by network operators and demanded by their subscribers.
One such area for improvement involves the performance in processing of various communications at the server level. The telephony protocols are typically extremely time-sensitive, more so than standard Web and HTTP transmissions. Accordingly, it would be desirable to optimize the processing of various telecommunications so as to minimize latency and improve performance. In addition, it would be advantageous to provide these improvements in distributed and highly scalable deployments, accessible via voice over internet protocols (VoIP).